Thanks for that Laurie and Leanne.
Things that might be carried on or by exotic Canada Geese, or House Crows?
Scott O'Keeffe
-----Original Message-----
From:
Behalf Of Laurie&Leanne
Knight
Sent: 11 November 2002 19:58
To: Birding Aus
Subject: Galapagos Finches Threatened by Exotic Flies
<The following item illustrates the importance of effective quarantine for
ecological conservation ...
http://www.birdlife.org.uk/news/pritem_display.cfm?NewRecID=709&NewType=P
Parasites pose new threat to Darwin's finches
08/11/02
Cambridge, UK, Friday 8th November 2002 -- BirdLife International today
warned
that Darwin's finches - made famous by Charles Darwin's theory of
evolution -
are facing a new and, for some species, potentially major threat from
parasitic
fly larvae which feed on nestling birds in the islands of the Galapagos
archipelago, Ecuador [1,2,3].
At least three species of fly are thought to have been accidentally
introduced
to the islands, the first having been found in 1997. A paper published in
the
latest issue of the ornithological journal, Ibis [4], reports on nesting
success
and nestling mortality of 12 native and introduced bird species affected by
the
flies' parasitic larvae, including seven of the 13 Darwin's finch species,
each
of which were found to have the new parasitic fly larvae in their nests.
"The potential impact of the newly discovered parasites may be major, and
further study of the scale of the threat is urgently required", says Birgit
Fessl of the Konrad Lorenz Institute, one of the paper's authors.
"Most worrying is the presence of these new parasites on Isabella Island,
the
only place in the world where the Critically Endangered Mangrove Finch
Camarhynchus heliobates occurs. This is the most threatened of the Darwin's
finches and numbers 110 individual birds in the wild", says BirdLife
International's Dr Nigel Collar, author of Threatened Birds of the Americas
[5,6]. "A decline in nestling survival resulting from these new parasitic
fly
larvae would severely threaten this already critical species with
extinction."
Although parasites that have evolved a host-parasite relationship often do
not
seriously harm their host populations, those brought into parasite-free
populations often cause severe harm before defence mechanisms evolve. Some
have
caused avian
extinctions.... etc>
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